Drone war

The Unblinking Stare

The drone war in Pakistan.

By Steve Coll

At the Pearl Continental Hotel, in Peshawar, a concrete tower enveloped by flowering gardens, the management has adopted security precautions that have become common in Pakistan’s upscale hospitality industry: razor wire, vehicle barricades, and police crouching in bunkers, fingering machine guns. In June, on a hot weekday morning, Noor Behram arrived at the gate carrying a white plastic shopping bag full of photographs. He had a four-inch black beard and wore a blue shalwar kameez and a flat Chitrali hat. He met me in the lobby. We sat down, and Behram spilled his photos onto a table. Some of the prints were curled and faded. For the past seven years, he said, he has driven around North Waziristan on a small red Honda motorcycle, visiting the sites of American drone missile strikes as soon after an attack as possible.

Behram is a journalist from North Waziristan, in northwestern Pakistan, and also works as a private investigator. He has been documenting the drone attacks for the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, a Pakistani nonprofit that is seeking redress for civilian casualties. In the beginning, he said, he had no training and only a cheap camera. I picked up a photo that showed Behram outdoors, in a mountainous area, holding up a shredded piece of women’s underwear. He said it was taken during his first investigation, in June, 2007, after an aerial attack on a training camp. American and Pakistani newspapers reported at the time that drone missiles had killed Al Qaeda-linked militants. There were women nearby as well. Although he was unable to photograph the victims’ bodies, he said, “I found charred, torn women’s clothing—that was the evidence.”

Since then, he went on, he has photographed about a hundred other sites in North Waziristan, creating a partial record of the dead, the wounded, and their detritus. Many of the faces before us were young. Behram said he learned from conversations with editors and other journalists that if a drone missile killed an innocent adult male civilian, such as a vegetable vender or a fruit seller, the victim’s long hair and beard would be enough to stereotype him as a militant. So he decided to focus on children.

Many of the prints had dates scrawled on the back. I looked at one from September 10, 2010. It showed a bandaged boy weeping; he appeared to be about seven years old. There was a photo of a girl with a badly broken arm, and one of another boy, also in tears, apparently sitting in a hospital. A print from August 23, 2010, showed a dead boy of perhaps ten, the son of an Afghan refugee named Bismillah Khan, who lived near a compound associated with the Taliban fighting group known as the Haqqani network. The boy’s skull had been bashed in.

Armed drones are slow-moving pilotless aircraft equipped with cameras, listening devices, and air-to-ground missiles. They can hover over their targets for hours, transmitting video feed of the scene below, and then strike suddenly. They can be flown by remote control from great distances. The models used by the C.I.A.—the Predator and the Reaper—look like giant robotic flying bugs, with unusual flaps and pole-like protrusions. Pilots steer them and fire missiles while sitting before video monitors; during a C.I.A. mission over Pakistan, a pilot might be at a base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, or as far away as Nevada.

Last year, in a speech at the National Defense University, President Obama acknowledged that American drones had killed civilians. He called these incidents “heartbreaking tragedies,” which would haunt him and those in his chain of command for “as long as we live.” But he went on to defend drones as the most discriminating aerial bombers available in modern warfare—preferable to piloted aircraft or cruise missiles. Jets and missiles cannot linger to identify and avoid noncombatants before striking, and, the President said, they are likely to cause “more civilian casualties and more local outrage.”

The President’s commitment to what his Administration calls “surgical strikes” against terrorists and guerrillas has come to define his approach to war and counterterrorism. The decision to enter into a conflict with the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, in which a precision air war, including the use of drones, figures heavily, is the latest, and perhaps the riskiest, manifestation of a growing reliance on targeted air strikes to manage terrorist threats. The strategy against ISIS is derived from the President’s experience commanding the C.I.A.’s drone war in Pakistan, and from similar but less active drone campaigns in Yemen and Somalia.

The conflict with ISIS once again pits the world’s most technologically advanced military against a stateless guerrilla group. In such a contest, civilian casualties are not only a moral issue; they constitute a front in a social-media contest over justice and credibility. This summer, when the Administration opened its air assault in northern Iraq, ISIS media specialists tweeted photos of children who reportedly had been killed and wounded earlier by American drones in Yemen.

Obama’s advocacy of drones has widespread support in Washington’s foreign-policy and defense establishments. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton wholeheartedly backed the drone campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen. Republican hawks like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who otherwise criticize the President as effete and indecisive, are also enthusiastic. But do drones actually represent a humanitarian advance in air combat? Or do they create a false impression of exactitude? And do they really serve the best interests of the United States?

Pakistan has absorbed more drone strikes—some four hundred—than any other country, and has been a test bed for the Administration’s hypotheses about the future of American airpower. Between mid-2008 and mid-2013, C.I.A.-operated drones waged what amounted to an undeclared, remotely controlled air war over North and South Waziristan, a sparse borderland populated almost entirely by ethnic Pashtuns. As the campaign evolved, it developed a dual purpose: to weaken Al Qaeda, and to suppress Taliban fighters who sought to cross into Afghanistan to attack American troops after Obama ordered a “surge” of forces there, in December, 2009. (Drone strikes continue in Pakistan; seventeen have been reported so far this year.) The drone war in Pakistan took place during an increasingly toxic, mutually resentful period in the long, unhappy chronicle of relations between the United States and Pakistan. To many Pakistanis, including Army officers and intelligence officials in the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or I.S.I., drone strikes have symbolized American arrogance. Within the C.I.A. and the White House, a belief took hold that Pakistani generals and intelligence chiefs were unreliable partners in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Administration officials concluded that since Pakistan wouldn’t help adequately to protect U.S. soldiers and American cities, they would send drones to do the job.

President Obama and C.I.A. officials characterize the drone campaign as a major success, because it significantly reduced the ability of “core Al Qaeda”—the organization founded by Osama bin Laden—to carry out terrorism on American soil and against American and British aviation. Moreover, Obama’s advisers argue, the drone war achieved this while inflicting few civilian casualties. And, they say, the machines helped the United States avoid conventional bombing or ground raids in Pakistan, which would have put American troops at risk and created even greater chaos and anger in an unstable country that possesses more than a hundred nuclear weapons.

In a 2012 report that was based on nine months of data analysis and field interviews, a team of law students from New York University and Stanford concluded that the dominant narrative in the U.S. about the use of drones in Pakistan—“a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the United States safer by enabling ‘targeted killing’ of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts”—is false. The researchers found that C.I.A.-operated drones were nowhere near as discriminating toward noncombatants as the agency’s leaders have claimed. Various estimates have put the civilian death toll in the hundreds. An analysis of media reports by the New America Foundation concluded that drones probably killed some two hundred and fifty to three hundred civilians in the decade leading up to 2014. Researchers working under Chris Woods at the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism conducted field interviews to supplement a separate analysis of media reporting. They estimated that American drones killed between four hundred and nine hundred and fifty civilians.

The C.I.A.’s position is that these nongovernmental counts are much too high and have been influenced, if inadvertently, by Pakistani government and Taliban propaganda. Early last year, the White House reviewed an internal classified count compiled by the C.I.A. of civilian deaths from drone strikes. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Select Committee on Intelligence, disclosed the count’s existence at a congressional hearing. She said that classified documents showed that civilian deaths caused by C.I.A. drones each year were “typically in the single digits.” The review remains unpublished—in part, a former Administration official said, because the White House couldn’t resolve internal debates about the reliability of its methodology. There was also reluctance to publish a specific number, since it would only invite more questions and might expose the scope of classified drone operations. (A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment for this article.)

The proportion of civilians compared to combatants killed on the ground during American wars since Vietnam has been disputed by researchers. But even the most conservative estimates of civilian casualties place the ratio at one-to-one. In the 1999 NATO-led war in Serbia, where jets used laser-guided and other precision bombs, around five hundred Serbian civilians and three hundred Serbian soldiers were killed, according to the Independent International Commission on Kosovo. The total death toll from drone strikes in Pakistan is estimated at between two thousand and four thousand. Even if one accepts a civilian death toll of nine hundred and fifty-seven—the highest nongovernmental estimate—drones have probably spared more civilians than American jets have in past air wars. And if the numbers Feinstein cited are accurate, drones killed more than twenty fighters for every civilian—a huge leap in precision. Nevertheless, even by that estimate hundreds of families in North and South Waziristan would have suffered the death of an innocent—hardly the foundation for an imagined new age of less provocative American bombing.

There are many reasons to be skeptical of the C.I.A.’s unpublished, lower estimate. According to former Obama Administration officials, the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, which oversees the agency’s drone operations, generates an after-action report, which includes an assessment of whether there was collateral damage. The center has a specialized, independent group that conducts post-strike investigations. The investigators grade the performances of their colleagues and bosses—not exactly a recipe for objectivity. But it seems clear that, over time, the Administration’s record improved significantly in avoiding civilian casualties.

In 2008, the last year of the Bush Administration, at least one child was reported killed in a third of all C.I.A. drone strikes in Pakistan, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism—a shocking percentage, if it is accurate. In Obama’s first year in office, the figure was twenty per cent—still very high. By 2012, it was five per cent.

Former participants in drone operations attribute the improvement in part to a second-generation armed drone, the Reaper, which allowed operators to scrutinize targets for longer periods on a single flight. Earlier drones carried five-foot-long Hellfire missiles, originally designed to destroy battle tanks; over time, the accuracy of Hellfires improved. The Reaper can also fire a missile, known as the Small Smart Weapon, that is less than two feet long and can take out an individual without killing people in the next room. Strike statistics suggest that, as the C.I.A. improved its procedures for sparing noncombatants, operators fired less often at private homes in North Waziristan, where women and children might also be present. After September, 2010, drones attacked suspected militants riding in vehicles more often than before. “There have been multiple improvements to tailor warheads’ blast radiuses to meet particular target characteristics,” David Deptula, who served as a deputy chief of staff for intelligence in the Air Force’s drone program until 2010, said.

Exactly why and how this change may have been ordered, like much else about the evolution of drone warfare, remains an official secret. The Obama Administration has shielded from public examination essential facts about how often targeting failed and innocents died, and why. In the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration alike, secrecy has defeated public candor and accountability.

Shortly after American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon, on September 11, 2001, computers at the C.I.A. flashed an instruction: “Immediate Evacuation.” From the seventh floor of the Old Headquarters Building, John Rizzo, the agency’s highest-ranking career lawyer, watched traffic jams form at the exits from the agency’s campus. He decided to stay put, as he recounted in a recent memoir. It was clear that the country had suffered an unprecedented terrorist attack, almost certainly by Al Qaeda, which the C.I.A. had been pursuing for several years. Rizzo took out a yellow legal pad and scribbled notes for what he assumed the agency would now require: a new Memorandum of Notification, or M.O.N., a bedrock document of any C.I.A. covert-action program.

A C.I.A. covert action seeks to surreptitiously influence events abroad while allowing the United States to deny the project’s existence. The National Security Act of 1947 legalized covert action as long as a President finds that it does not violate the Constitution or U.S. law and is required to protect the nation. A President must sign a written “Finding” that authorizes the program. Memorandums of Notification are highly classified follow-on documents—specific orders from a President to the C.I.A. describing the scope and the necessity of the operation. They can be concise, sometimes as short as a single page.

On September 17, 2001, President George W. Bush signed a new counterterrorism M.O.N., partly based on Rizzo’s input. It was “multiple pages” in length, according to Rizzo. He had worked at the C.I.A. since 1976 and he regarded this document as the “most comprehensive, most ambitious, most aggressive, and most risky Finding or M.O.N. I was ever involved in.” Among its provisions, “one short paragraph” authorized targeted killings of Al Qaeda terrorists and their allies. “The language was simple and stark.” That paragraph became the foundation for the C.I.A.’s drone operations.

George Tenet, the agency’s director at the time, supplemented the M.O.N. with internal guidelines that set down in greater detail how an individual believed to be actively involved in terrorist plots could be nominated and approved for capture or killing. Among other things, the guidelines instructed drone supervisors to avoid civilian casualties “to the maximum extent possible,” according to a former senior intelligence official. It was a decidedly lawyerly and elastic standard.

Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharraf, an Army general who had seized power in a 1999 coup, became a trusted partner as the Bush Administration’s Global War on Terror unfolded. When American-led forces invaded Afghanistan, in the fall of 2001, many Al Qaeda leaders and foot soldiers—Arabs, Uzbeks, Chechens—escaped into Pakistan. They settled mainly in a region known as FATA, for Federally Administered Tribal Areas, which includes North and South Waziristan and has been a staging ground for jihadist warfare since the nineteen-seventies. Pakistan’s generals and politicians, who come mainly from the country’s dominant, more developed province of Punjab, treated Waziristan’s residents “as if they were tribes that were living in the Amazon,” the journalist Abubakar Siddique, who grew up in the region and is the author of “The Pashtun Question,” told me.

In 2002, Musharraf sent Pakistan’s Army into South Waziristan to quell Al Qaeda and local sympathizers. In 2004, the Army intensified its operations, and, as violence spread, Musharraf allowed the C.I.A. to fly drones to support Pakistani military action. In exchange, Musharraf told me, the Bush Administration “supplied us helicopters with precision weapons and night-operating capability.” He added, “The problem was intelligence collection and targeting. . . . The Americans brought the drones to bear.”

Musharraf allowed the C.I.A. to operate drones out of a Pakistani base in Baluchistan. He told me that he often urged Bush Administration officials, “Give the drones to Pakistan.” That was not possible, he was told, “because of high-technology transfer restrictions.”

On June 17, 2004, a C.I.A. drone killed Nek Muhammad, a Pakistani jihadi leader in Wana, in South Waziristan, who had coöperated with Al Qaeda and led attacks against the Pakistani military. That strike and three subsequent ones in North Waziristan during 2005 were carried out with prior approval from I.S.I., a senior C.I.A. official who served in the region told me. “I would show them the Predator footage and I would say, ‘This is what is happening—massive training camps.’ ” He added, “Every one of these shots was with Pakistani approval.”

For several years, the Bush Administration used drone strikes sparingly. At the C.I.A., according to Brian Glyn Williams, a historian at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth (his book “Predators: The C.I.A.’s Drone War on Al Qaeda” was published last year), some career officers were reluctant to use drones, because they had “seen the agency burned in the past.” Some also feared that too many strikes would destabilize Pakistan and jeopardize Musharraf’s position.

In 2006, Bush chose Michael Hayden, a former Air Force general, to be the agency’s director. The Counterterrorism Center also got a new leader. His cover name, which has been reported elsewhere, is Roger. Former colleagues describe him as an acerbic, chain-smoking convert to Islam. At a time when Al Qaeda showed signs of revived potency, he argued that drone strikes could weaken its leadership and prevent terrorist attacks on the United States.

That year, an Uzbek militant who had been arrested and detained in Afghanistan told his American interrogators that they should check out the bottom of the wheeled duffel he had been toting when he was taken in. They pulled the bag out of storage and found, according to a senior government official involved in the case, “an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of paper, folded up,” in a hole next to the wheel. It contained Al Qaeda’s “code system,” the official said—that is, code words used in radio and cell-phone communications to discuss meeting arrangements and plans for violent operations.

The paper also mapped militants’ facilities in the vicinity of Miranshah, one of North Waziristan’s main towns, the official recalled. The breakthrough led to an ambitious mapping and analysis effort involving satellite photography of Miranshah residences. The National Security Agency searched for the code words in archived transcripts of intercepted phone calls, in order to discover undetected plots and to pinpoint the locations of Al Qaeda leaders. Soon, this effort was also supporting American drone strikes in North Waziristan.

In July, 2008, President Bush approved a plan, proposed by Hayden, to increase drone strikes on Pakistani soil, mainly in North and South Waziristan. Taliban fighters were pouring into Afghanistan from fata, without much interference from Pakistan, to attack American troops. “These sons of bitches are killing Americans. I’ve had enough,” Bush told Hayden, according to Bob Woodward’s “Obama’s Wars” (2010). No longer would the United States seek permission from Pakistan to strike or notify Pakistani generals in advance. (Musharraf, who had been coddled and protected by Bush for years, was facing impeachment and resigned a month later.)

Hayden approved changes to the internal C.I.A. targeting and strike guidelines. These changes gave rise to what would become known as “signature strikes.” The new rules allowed drone operators to fire at armed military-aged males engaged in or associated with suspicious activity even if their identities were unknown. (To justify this looser approach, a former Administration official said, C.I.A. lawyers relied on instructions in an M.O.N. that permitted strikes on terrorist property and facilities.)

Signature strikes are “not a concept known to international humanitarian law,” according to Christof Heyns, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions. The proper standard for attacking a person under the laws of war is whether the person has a “continuous combat function” or is “directly participating in hostilities.” If a signature strike rests on “targeting without sufficient information to make the necessary determination, it is clearly unlawful,” Heyns argues in a 2013 report submitted to the U.N. General Assembly. The Obama Administration’s position is that, relying on intelligence sources, the C.I.A.’s remote operators could determine whether armed men were involved in violence directed against American personnel and interests. Under the laws of war, which the Administration asserted were applicable in fata, it isn’t necessary to know the names of enemy guerrillas before attacking.

After mid-2008, the drone program changed quickly into a more conventional, if unacknowledged, air war. In the three months between August and October, drones struck North and South Waziristan at least twenty times—more strikes than in the previous four years. The C.I.A.’s operators repeatedly hit Al Qaeda or Taliban targets when women and children were present. On September 8, 2008, missiles demolished a North Waziristan home belonging to Jalaluddin Haqqani, the defiantly anti-American leader of the Haqqani network. He was absent, but Al Qaeda’s chief in Pakistan, Abu Haris, was reportedly killed. Eight women and five children also died, according to a ledger of drone strikes maintained by the FATA government. The ledger records ten other cases of civilian casualties between September and December of 2008. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, children were killed in seven of these instances. When I asked Hayden about those statistics, he replied, “The C.I.A. never had to be reminded of the value of human life. I’m a G.I. and I know the laws of armed conflict: Necessity, distinction, and proportionality are the three rules.” Hayden declined to comment specifically about the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism program in Pakistan, but he added that unmanned aerial vehicles provide “an unblinking stare at a target and the opportunity to be incredibly precise.”

In November, Hayden briefed President-elect Obama. According to Gregory Craig, who subsequently joined the new Administration as White House counsel, “Hayden had obviously spent a lot of time, energy, and intellectual resources preparing to explain the drone program—to reassure us about why it was such a successful counterterrorism tool.” Hayden’s presentation was effective, Craig said. “I walked out of there convinced.”

On January 23, 2009, three days after Obama took office, two C.I.A. drones struck inside Pakistan—one in South Waziristan and one in North Waziristan. Both attacks reportedly killed civilians. The strike in North Waziristan hit a private home in the village of Zeraki. According to an affidavit from two witnesses, filed in a complaint to the United Nations Human Rights Council, the dead included an eighth-grade boy and schoolteachers. The South Waziristan strike killed a pro-government peace negotiator who was a tribal leader and four of his family members, entirely in error, according to “Kill or Capture” (2012), a book about Obama’s counterterrorism policy by the former Newsweek reporter Daniel Klaidman.

According to Klaidman, John Brennan, at the time Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, briefed the President about the South Waziristan mistake and Obama asked how it could have happened, given the weapons’ supposed pinpoint accuracy. The President delivered sharp words to C.I.A. officials about the targeting error. Yet he ordered no changes in drone targeting rules at the time, Klaidman reported.

Brennan was a career C.I.A. analyst and a former station chief in Riyadh. He had advised Obama during the 2008 Presidential campaign. Invited to join the Administration, he supported and managed his former agency’s advocacy of the targeted killing of suspected terrorists. Brennan also had the experience and the gravitas to push back at the C.I.A. Obama grew to trust him deeply on counterterrorism policy, according to former Administration officials.

To succeed Hayden as the agency’s director, Obama selected Leon Panetta, a former chairman of the House Budget Committee, who was known for his bluntness. During the Clinton Administration, he had headed the Office of Management and Budget and served as White House chief of staff. He had barely any intelligence experience. New C.I.A. directors, especially those who are outsiders, are typically advised not to alienate career C.I.A. officers serving on the front lines. Unlike F.B.I. directors, who are appointed to ten-year terms, C.I.A. directors come and go; the agency’s bureaucracy has learned to outlast them. Counterterrorism Center leaders saw the drone campaign as their most important operation, and Panetta backed them fully. As he familiarized himself with the C.I.A., Panetta judged the Counterterrorism Center to be “very effective, well run, well resourced, well managed,” a former Administration official told me. In 2009, Panetta oversaw some fifty lethal drone attacks; more than half of them produced civilian deaths, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. “American policy was to avoid civilian casualties wherever possible,” Panetta wrote in his recently published memoir. An operation that deliberately targeted women or children alongside terrorist suspects “was to be authorized only under extraordinary circumstances.” Panetta described cases in which he gave such permission, while seeking to “balance duty to country and respect for life.”

In December, 2009, a Jordanian doctor whom the C.I.A. had recruited as an agent inside Al Qaeda blew himself up at an American base in Khost, Afghanistan, killing six agency officers and a contractor. He had really been working for the Pakistani Taliban. The attack was “a big emotional moment for Panetta,” the former Administration official said. The following year, the number of drone strikes inside Pakistan doubled. “The C.I.A. really went to war,” a participant in White House discussions about the attacks recalled, and Brennan and Obama were supportive. “The White House stood back.”

At dusk in Islamabad one evening early this summer, I drove to Fatima Jinnah Park, a vast expanse of footpaths, fields, and eucalyptus trees. It was filled with strolling couples and families on picnics. An acquaintance had arranged a meeting with half a dozen young men from North Waziristan, most of them university students, who had lived through parts of the American drone war in their home villages and towns. In a coffee shop, we sat on plastic chairs in a semicircle and ordered soft drinks. The young men wore polo shirts and bluejeans. Most of them came from relatively privileged tribal families that had suffered during the Taliban’s rise to power in Waziristan. The students asked me not to identify them.

Some had come of age as Taliban volunteers. One said that, after 2001, when he was ten or eleven, he carried plastic buckets from house to house to collect money for the organization. Taliban warriors were seen as heroes. “Our parents went to the jihad during the nineteen-eighties,” a student said. He meant the C.I.A.-backed campaign against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. “Eight or ten years ago, we were all in favor of the Taliban.”

That changed. One young man described how the Taliban had kidnapped his father for ransom. Others talked of arbitrary rules and detentions once the Taliban asserted power, after 2007, when they were teen-agers. “We are between two extremes,” another student said. “We face regular forces and we also face irregular forces with long hair, beards, and their codes of conduct. It was very difficult to resist them. They imposed their own brand of Islam. If you did not coöperate, you were kidnapped, you were beheaded.”

The Taliban are “terrorists,” he continued. But he considered the United States a greater menace, because, as the world’s leading military power, it “controlled all of this, or could have.” But America pursued its own objectives, he said, mainly with drone strikes. “Our economy has been destroyed, our social structure has been destroyed.”

“The drones create a lot of misery in our area,” one student said. “So do the Arabs.” He meant Al Qaeda. “Why are the Arabs coming to our country? Why are they not fighting in their own countries? But we also say to America: If you say the Taliban are terrorists, yes, we agree. They are. But who created them?”

As night fell and we talked on, some of the young men acknowledged that the drone strikes they had seen or heard about from family members have been highly accurate. A few thought that drones offered a better way to bomb Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders in their home towns than F-16s flown by Pakistani pilots, whose bombing could be much more erratic, placing more local civilians at risk. But they also talked about the suffering their families had endured—kidnappings, homes abandoned under pressure—and their own struggles to obtain an education. In their telling, the relative precision of the aircraft that assailed them wasn’t the point.

Being attacked by a drone is not the same as being bombed by a jet. With drones, there is typically a much longer prelude to violence. Above North Waziristan, drones circled for hours, or even days, before striking. People below looked up to watch the machines, hovering at about twenty thousand feet, capable of unleashing fire at any moment, like dragon’s breath. “Drones may kill relatively few, but they terrify many more,” Malik Jalal, a tribal leader in North Waziristan, told me. “They turned the people into psychiatric patients. The F-16s might be less accurate, but they come and go.”

Predator and Reaper drones emit what, on the ground, sounds like a flat, gnawing buzz. (Locals sometimes refer to a drone as a bangana, a Pashto word for “wasp.”) “In the night, we have seen many times the missile streaking,” Ihsan Dawar, a Pakistani reporter from North Waziristan, told me. “It creates a whoosh-like sound coming out.”

The targeted killing of Taliban and Al Qaeda members had a boomerang effect: it spurred the militants to try to identify spies who might have betrayed them. Around North Waziristan’s main towns, Miranshah and Mir Ali, which took the brunt of the strikes, paranoia spread.

The Taliban blamed local maliks, government-subsidized tribal leaders who had long presided over the area’s war economy—smuggling, arms dealing, mining, and government contracting—often by engaging in corruption. Taliban gunmen seeking control of local rackets executed maliks and their family members in the hundreds. In local bazaars, the Taliban distributed DVDs of their socially superior victims confessing that they had spied for C.I.A. drone operators.

The confessions included elaborate narratives about how the agency supposedly distributed “chips,” or homing beacons, to local spies. The spy would toss a chip over a neighbor’s wall or into a Taliban jeep, to guide drone missiles to it. The men also confessed that the C.I.A. had given out special pens with invisible ink which were used to mark Taliban vehicles for destruction.

According to the accounts of former detainees, the Taliban tortured their prisoners, so the confessions can hardly be taken at face value. The Taliban also had a powerful motive to force the maliks to admit to spying: such confessions “take the edge off the revenge motivation of the malik’s tribe and family,” a researcher who grew up in North Waziristan and works in development in Islamabad told me. “People see the video and say, ‘Oh, well, if he was a spy tossing around chips, then he deserves to die.’ ”

Homing beacons are common in policing and espionage. The C.I.A. no doubt uses such devices. Yet it’s far from clear whether actual C.I.A. spies in North Waziristan operated by planting chips. The cameras and the telephone-tracking equipment on drones would also allow the C.I.A. to identify and follow targets.

“As a journalist, I haven’t seen any chip,” Dawar told me. “I don’t know if it has any reality behind it or is just a myth.” Yet many people believe, he added, that a chip “throws off ultraviolet rays or some kind of magic ray and the missile comes and hits the target.”

Not only do many civilians in Waziristan credit the existence of chips but many Taliban do, too. “Once, when I was home, we had a Taliban commander come to our guesthouse and ask to spend the night,” the researcher in Islamabad recalled. “He slept in the guesthouse, but he made his driver and two guards sleep in the car and stand around it all night to prevent someone from using the magic pen.”

Families in North Waziristan typically live within large walled compounds. Several brothers, their parents, and their extended families might share a single complex. Each compound may contain a hujra, or guesthouse, which usually stands just outside the main wall. In the evening, men gather there to eat dinner and talk war and politics. A rich man signals his status by building a large hujra with comfortable guest rooms for overnight visitors. The less well-heeled might have a hujra with just two rooms, carpets, rope cots, and cushions.

Taliban and Al Qaeda commanders moved from hujra to hujra to avoid detection. The available records of drone strikes make clear that the operators would regularly pick up commanders’ movements, follow them to a hujra attached to a private home, watch for hours—or days—and then fire. Many documented strikes took place after midnight, when the target was presumably not moving, children were asleep, and visitors would have returned home.

North Waziristan residents and other Pakistanis I spoke with emphasized how difficult it would be for a drone operator to distinguish between circumstances where a Taliban or Al Qaeda commander had been welcomed into a hujra and where the commander had bullied or forced his way in. If the Taliban “comes to my hujra and asks for shelter, you have no choice,” Saleem Safi, a journalist who has travelled extensively in Waziristan, told me. “Now a potential drone target is living in a guest room or a guesthouse on your compound, one wall away from your own house and family.”

“You can’t protect your family from a strike on a hujra,” another resident of North Waziristan said. “Your children will play nearby. They will even go inside to play.” The researcher in Islamabad said, “There is always peer pressure, tribal pressure, to be hospitable.” He went on, “If you say no, you look like a coward and you lose face. Anyway, you can’t say no to them. If a drone strike does take place, you are a criminal in the courts of the Taliban,” because you are suspected of espionage and betrayal. “You are also a criminal to the government, because you let the commander sleep in your hujra.” In such a landscape, the binary categories recognized by international law—combatant or noncombatant—can seem inadequate to describe the culpability of those who died. Women, children, and the elderly feel pressure from all sides. A young man of military age holding a gun outside a hujra might be a motivated Taliban volunteer, a reluctant conscript, or a victim of violent coercion.

During 2009 and 2010, many of the deaths of children and other civilians recorded contemporaneously by the FATA government occurred during strikes on hujras and homes. Noor Behram’s photography and that of other journalists occasionally brought the faces of injured or dead children to public attention, through the Pakistani press and Western human-rights groups. The photos offered a narrative of civilian suffering and became propaganda tools for Taliban media outlets. Targeting errors also became a front in an information war waged by I.S.I. against the United States.

For decades, I.S.I. officers have harbored deep ambivalence about their putative allies at the C.I.A. (According to Pew Research Center opinion polls, a majority of Pakistanis believe that the United States is an enemy of their country.) Beginning in 2009, the Obama Administration, led by the special representative Richard Holbrooke, sought to lessen the mistrust by launching a “strategic dialogue” with Pakistan’s military and intelligence leaders, as well as with Pakistan’s weak elected civilian politicians. By early 2011, however, that effort had failed. In late January of that year, on a street in Lahore, Raymond Davis, a C.I.A. contractor, shot and killed two men who he believed were trying to kill him, touching off a furor. I.S.I. leaders felt that the C.I.A.’s unilateral operations inside Pakistan had got out of control. Now, when civilians died in drone strikes, I.S.I. helped to whip up public protests.

“That anti-American narrative was basically sponsored by the Army and I.S.I.,” Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and the author of “Descent Into Chaos” (2008), an investigation of Pakistan’s borderlands after the American invasion of Afghanistan, told me. “We all knew it was being orchestrated. The Americans knew, the public knew, the Pakistani media knew. But nobody said anything. Nobody had the courage to say anything.” In Washington, evidence that I.S.I. was exploiting C.I.A. strikes to stir anti-American sentiment reduced what incentives the Obama Administration might have had to own up to genuine mistakes: to do so would only play into I.S.I.’s hands.

Still, around this time, as C.I.A. drone operators became more experienced and the technology improved, they shifted away from targeting terrorist “hideouts” and hujras and toward targeting militants’ vehicles, according to the FATA ledger of drone strikes. Between March and August, 2010, two-thirds of all C.I.A. drone strikes in North and South Waziristan killed people in compounds or guesthouses. During the next six months, more than half of the strikes hit cars, jeeps, or motorcycles.

The Obama Administration might have benefitted from describing in public how it was adjusting tactics to spare innocent lives. It might have investigated reported errors and compensated survivors, as the U.S. military has done routinely since 2005 whenever it mistakenly kills civilians in Afghanistan. Instead, the law and the logic of secrecy surrounding the C.I.A. campaign silenced the Administration. Jon Stewart riffed freely about drones on “The Daily Show,” but at the State Department, a former official there recalled, “we didn’t even know if we were allowed to write the word ‘drone’ in an unclassified e-mail.”

The real mistake, according to Ahmed Rashid, was that the C.I.A. went along with Pakistan’s hypocrisy in denying that it knew anything about the drone program. To cover up Pakistan’s official lies, the United States undermined its own credibility. “Somewhere along the way, the Americans should have drawn a line,” Rashid said.

Datta Khel lies about twenty-five miles southwest of Miranshah, toward the border with Afghanistan. Near the town’s market and bus depot is an open area suitable for an assembly. On the morning of March 17, 2011, roughly thirty-five maliks, government-approved tribal leaders, had gathered for a jirga, a traditional dispute-resolution meeting. The subject was a feud over a chromite mine.

“There were two tribes in the area, Manzarkhel and Maddakhel,” the tribal leader Malik Jalal told me. “The dispute was between these two tribes. They were taking chromite out, but there was a question of who owned what.” The Pakistani government knew of the jirga session. Khasadars, or local police, paid by the government, were in attendance, according to court filings.

That morning, Jalal was a little more than two miles away. “I could see the drones in the air, and I actually saw the missiles fly and then heard the explosions,” he said. “When I reached the spot, I saw many body parts.” The FATA government’s contemporaneous ledger of strikes recorded that forty-one people died, and it noted, “The attack was carried out on a jirga and it is feared that all the killed were local tribesmen.”

Angry protests erupted in Pakistan. A few Taliban may have been present at the jirga, but the majority were not anti-American fighters, Pakistani officials told reporters at the time. General Ashfaq Kayani, then Pakistan’s Army chief, issued a rare public statement of dissent about C.I.A. operations: “It is highly regrettable that a jirga of peaceful citizens, including elders of the area, was carelessly and callously targeted with complete disregard to human life.”

The Obama Administration took a hard line. All of the dead were “terrorists,” an anonymous American official told the Times. “These people weren’t gathering for a bake sale.” The Associated Press quoted an anonymous official offering the same talking point: “This was a group of terrorists, not a charity car wash.”

C.I.A. drones had been unusually active in North Waziristan in the days before the jirga strike. On March 11th, drones struck a “suspected vehicle boarded by militants,” according to the Pakistani ledger. That evening, a drone bombed a village. Two days later, a drone blew up a “state car” travelling across North Waziristan. On March 16th, a drone destroyed a compound near Datta Khel. From the available evidence, it seems likely that C.I.A. targeting analysts tracked a suspect to the jirga and then decided to kill everyone present.

Afterward, Obama ordered a suspension of C.I.A. drone strikes, according to a former Administration official. No strikes took place in Pakistan for almost a month. But the former official said that Obama authorized an exception to his freeze if the C.I.A. located a “high-value target.” When drones struck South Waziristan, in mid-April, a debate erupted in the White House about whether the C.I.A. had violated Obama’s order.

Cameron Munter, the U.S. Ambassador in Islamabad at the time, and now a professor at Pomona College, had expressed his deep concern to his intelligence counterparts in both Islamabad and Washington about the extent of drone killing. Munter believed it had got out of hand and was destabilizing Pakistan. According to Mark Mazzetti’s “The Way of the Knife” (2013), Munter thought the timing of the jirga strike was “disastrous.” After that attack, he argued again to the C.I.A. that it would be a good time to cool down. “The drone strike on March 17th, it exploded—it was just huge,” Munter told me. “But, you see, dealing with people at the C.I.A., when I raised it with them, they said, ‘You know this is a never-ending war. Whose side are you on?’ ”

If the Raymond Davis case and the jirga attack strained U.S.-Pakistani relations, the Navy SEAL raid that killed bin Laden, on May 1st, upended them. Kayani and other top generals felt humiliated that they had not been informed in advance. The fact that bin Laden had been hiding less than a mile from Pakistan’s principal military academy raised the obvious question of who in Pakistan’s establishment might have helped him. In what appeared to be an assertion of the C.I.A.’s freedom to operate independently in Pakistan, the agency resumed drone strikes in North Waziristan five days after the seal raid, at about the same pace as before.

In June, John Brennan appeared at a public seminar on counterterrorism at Johns Hopkins University. Clearly referring to drones, he said, “Nearly for the past year, there hasn’t been a single collateral death, because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.” That claim would have encompassed the jirga strike and a hundred and twenty other strikes in North and South Waziristan dating back to the previous summer, including at least a dozen cases in which nongovernmental researchers have found probable civilian deaths.

On November 16, 2011, C.I.A. drone operators killed a twenty-three-year-old American citizen, Jude Kenan Mohammad, during a nighttime signature strike on a residence in Babar Ghar, in South Waziristan. His death was confirmed only eighteen months later by Attorney General Eric Holder. The C.I.A. apparently did not know of Mohammad’s presence in the house.

Mohammad had come of age in Raleigh, North Carolina, and had fallen in with aspiring jihadists; his presence at the site of the attack might indicate that he had become a volunteer soldier. Yet he was not targeted for death as an individual, and, given his American citizenship, any deliberate strike on him would likely have to have been authorized only after an in-depth review overseen by President Obama.

In April, 2012, George Stephanopoulos questioned Brennan on the subject of drones: “Do you stand by the statement you have made in the past that, as effective as they have been, they have not killed a single civilian? That seems hard to believe.”

“Well, what I said was that over a period of time before my public remarks that we had no information about a single civilian, a noncombatant, being killed,” Brennan replied.

In fact, Brennan had not used the “no information” formula in his remarks at Johns Hopkins the previous year. And his epistemological defense indicated why it has proved impossible to reconcile the large gap between the Administration’s count of civilian deaths and those of the Pakistani government and nongovernmental researchers. The C.I.A. has never explained the criteria it uses to count a drone victim as a civilian. Nor has it described what sort of interviews or field research, if any, the agency’s analysts undertake to investigate possible mistakes. According to a May, 2012, Times article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants . . . unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” In briefings to congressional intelligence committees, the C.I.A. has disputed that characterization, saying that any person deliberately targeted must be associated with a known fighting group or enemy facility, or else be observed preparing for violence.

After the interview with Stephanopoulos, Brennan, during a speech in Washington, further qualified his claims about the precision of drones. “Despite the extraordinary precautions we take, civilians have been accidentally killed,” he said. “It is exceedingly rare, but it has happened.” He added, “We take it very, very seriously. We go back and we review our actions.”

By mid-2012, Obama had ordered Brennan to reassess drone policy. The following spring, at the National Defense University, the President announced a new policy for American drone operations, which remains in effect. The full rulebook is highly classified. Yet Obama did make one new standard public. Before striking, drone operators must determine to a “near certainty” that no civilians are in harm’s way—a considerably tougher standard than the C.I.A.’s original one, which dates to the Bush Administration.

Ned Price, a National Security Council spokesman, while declining to discuss any C.I.A. operations, said that Obama’s “near certainty” standard was “the highest that we can set.” He added, “In those rare instances in which it appears noncombatants may have been killed or injured, after-action reviews have been conducted to determine why, and to insure that we are taking the most effective steps to minimize such risk to noncombatants in the future.”

In early 2013, Obama asked Brennan to lead the C.I.A. The President appointed as Brennan’s deputy Avril Haines, a National Security Council lawyer who had worked on drone-strike rules and operations. The number of drone strikes carried out in Pakistan fell. Since Brennan became C.I.A. director, according to the data compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, there has not been a single documented civilian casualty, child or adult, as a result of a drone strike in Waziristan.

Obama’s experience of drone war—including the criticism he has received from international lawyers and human-rights groups over civilian casualties—may have motivated him, last year, to tighten targeting oversight, albeit in secret and while evading accountability for errors made early in his Administration. Yet the President and his advisers don’t seem to accept how little credit the United States is ever likely to receive from targeted populations just because it chooses to bomb with more accurate drones. On the ground in North Waziristan, drone war doesn’t feel much different from other forms of air war, in that many civilians are displaced and frightened, and suffer loss of life and property.

Despite the drone campaign’s measurable successes—diminishing the influence of core Al Qaeda, the group around bin Laden that once planned international attacks from Waziristan, and of Al Qaeda in Yemen—the terrorist movement has assumed new shapes in Syria, North Africa, and elsewhere. Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are still beset by jihadist violence.

In a research paper published this summer, Micah Zenko and Sarah Kreps, two scholars at the Council on Foreign Relations, argued that the very precision of drone technology raises the prospect for “moral hazard.” The reduction in risks may tempt governments to order drones into action more frequently than they would conventional bombers or missiles. In other words, drones may spare more innocents but they may also create more war.

“I think the greatest problem is the mentality that accompanies drone strikes,” Philip Alston, an N.Y.U. law professor who investigated drone attacks for the U.N. between 2004 and 2010, told me. “The identification of a list of targets, and if we can succeed in eliminating that list we will have achieved good things—that mentality is what drives it all: if only we can get enough of these bastards, we’ll win the war.”

One Sunday evening in Islamabad, as pre-monsoon storm clouds blew over the Margalla Hills, I crossed the city’s checkpoints to reach the French Club, an oasis notable for the imported liquor in its private bar. I accompanied Mirza Shahzad Akbar, a club member. During the Musharraf years, Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who was trained in London, investigated political corruption for the government. Later, he joined a private firm to serve corporate clients. Four years ago, inspired by an American human-rights lawyer he met in Pakistan, he decided to leave his law firm for the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, which he now leads. He spends his days working with investigators like Noor Behram to collect photographic evidence and sworn testimony about drone-targeting errors, and to advance lawsuits against the Pakistani government, the C.I.A., and sundry American officials.

Akbar is a portly man, partly bald, with a Vandyke beard. Like many members of the Pakistani élite, he is well versed in global media culture. We discussed “Homeland,” contenders for the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, and European politics. Later, at his law office, we talked for hours about drones. What sets Akbar apart from Pakistan’s privileged class is his passionate advocacy for clients from a population that has virtually no influence or voice even within Pakistan, let alone in Washington: the residents of North and South Waziristan who do not wish to fight in a war.

“When I enter a party, people say, ‘It’s the Taliban’s lawyer,’ ” he told me. “There are lots of jokes. I’ve stopped saying what I do.” His friends argue vehemently, he continued, that while “it’s bad if there are a few civilian casualties” from drones, “there is more damage caused by Pakistani F-16s, and, anyway, if we don’t stop them they’ll take over and we’ll all have beards and our wives and daughters will be in burkas.”

When I asked how he answered that argument, he replied, “If we’re true liberals, we should also protect the rights of the Taliban.” (His foundation does not litigate on behalf of militants or their families.)

Akbar has trouble getting visas to travel to the United States. After he sued the C.I.A., he said, his car was stolen and his office was trashed—events that he assumed were not random. Obama Administration officials, speaking anonymously to the Times, once accused Akbar of fronting for I.S.I. in order to harass the C.I.A. He and his supporters in the West deny that. His foundation’s financial support has come mainly from the Bertha Foundation and Reprieve, the British human-rights group. After his lawsuits received widespread publicity in Pakistan, low-level I.S.I. officers visited him a couple of times; he told them that he was serving Pakistan’s interests, and they have left him alone.

For Pakistani human-rights advocates, the drone war in Waziristan poses a problem of lesser evils: which is worse, American bombing or Taliban revolution? Taliban suicide bombers have killed thousands of civilians in Pakistan’s cities, and the movement is loathed and feared. In June, the Pakistani Army launched a major assault on the Taliban in Waziristan. C.I.A. drones reportedly struck Uzbek militants during the operation. Over all, the Pakistani Army has fought the Taliban to a stalemate, but the group’s adherents have gained influence in areas of Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial capital, and can still launch successful attacks even in Islamabad. Many Pakistanis understand all too well that their government lacks the competence and the credibility to suppress the Taliban. Some among the élite, therefore, welcome—or, at least, accept—the C.I.A.’s drone strikes as a necessary, temporary compromise.

“From Day One, I’ve been saying, I’m not against drones,” Akbar said. “It’s just a machine. It’s more precise than jets. But it’s only as precise as your intelligence.” Collecting target information from the sky is difficult; so is gathering information from a semi-hostile partner on the ground, like I.S.I. Akbar wondered aloud if I.S.I., to discredit the United States in the eyes of Pakistanis and the world, might “sometimes give the C.I.A. false targeting information.” It would not be surprising.

For as long as the United States does not openly acknowledge targeting errors or pay compensation for victims, and for as long as the Pakistani government lies to the public about its complicity in drone killings, the images of dead civilians that Akbar’s investigators collect and publish will resonate. “This is not about taking the Taliban side or the American side,” Akbar said. He believes that the United States should hold itself to a higher standard than the Pakistani government. “Our work has been about the fact that there is no transparency or accountability in the U.S. drone program in Pakistan.”